Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
But i am particularly curious not about the technical issues, but about people's experiences - if there are any - with the actual content.
When I became involved with English Wikipedia it had fewer than 50,000 articles, and many of them were stubs. [[Special:WantedPages]] was very useful in finding things to write about. It is currently disabled, and has not been updated since last October. It counted the number of red links to a title, and listed the 50 with the most links. Wikifying, was an important task for any editor; they were encouraged to create links to anything that might reasonably be expected to have an article. This feature should be made more prominent in the smaller wikis.
For example, i can quite easily imagine teachers in some countries saying: "Why should we write encyclopedia articles or textbooks in our local language? Textbooks should be written in English / Russian / French / Spanish / Portuguese." Did anyone have to cope with that?
It's not just teachers. Some governments and religions have actively suppressed minority languages. In Canada the residential school system was nothing less than cultural genocide. The practice has stopped, but its effects remain. The dominant colonial languages are still seen as the means to make a better life for oneself. To those who hope to feed their families cultural matters take a back seat.
I am not even talking about countries where it is a question of language preservation; for example, in regions of Russia such as Tatarstan or Sakha most people know Russian and many know Russian better than their regional language. In this case, writing a Wikipedia in Tatar is not an immediate educational necessity, because Russian textbooks are accessible to people. It is rather a question of preserving the local culture; i strongly support that, but there are worse cases.
For some languages the script that was developed by anthropologists a century ago was more suited to the needs of anthropologists trying to impose Greco-Roman grammatical concepts where they didn't belong.
I am rather talking about countries in, for example, Africa, where people don't necessarily know English or French well, but where education nevertheless functions mostly in a foreign language. Do people there even imagine that it's possible or desirable to write an encyclopedia in their language? Given all the technical tools and support, will they actually think that it's worth doing it?
Our techies can easily solve questions of tools for writing these languages. We need to ask the people what is important to them about their language. Forget about translating the details of nuclear physics or modern mathematics; if native English speakers have difficulties in these subjects in their own language it won't be any easier in these other languages. An article about basic agricultural techniques may be more to the point.
Ray